“Sierra, this is Fox Three-six,” Huber said. “When Central gives us an alert, the C and C box’ll choose the best overwatch position and direct the nearest car to it. The rest of Sierra’ll bypass that car, which’ll leapfrog forward when it comes out of air defense mode. It may be that there’ll be more than one car at a time out of the column. Three-six out.”
There was a series of Rogers from the other officers. Huber hadn’t bothered to run the plan by Sierra Six before delivering it to the whole unit. Sangrela’d tasked him with the solution of the problem, and it was something that an infantry officer didn’t have much experience with anyway.
“What happens if the bad guys’re waiting out in the woods, El-Tee?” Deseau asked over the intercom from the driver’s compartment. He had the hatch open so that he could drive with his head out in the breeze. “With the guns locked on air defense, a lone car’s pretty much dead meat, right?”
“The same thing that happens if you fall out a window drunk, Frenchie,” Huber said with a quiver of irritation. Did Deseau think that hadn’t occurred to him? But there wasn’t any choice. With only four cars, he couldn’t detach a second unit to guard the one on air defense. “Either you get up and go on, or you don’t.”
“Yeah, that’s about what I figured,” Deseau said. He sighed. “You don’t suppose me ‘n Tranter could trade off again, do you?”
“Negative,” said Huber. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
He too would like to have Frenchie in the fighting compartment, watching their surroundings with his shoulder weapon while the gunnery computer aimed the tribarrels skyward. Huber’d like a lot of things, but he was a veteran. He’d make do with what he had.
The alert from Central overrode F-3’s helmet AIs, filling ninety percent of each faceshield with fire control data and relegating previous tasks to a box in the center. Huber flicked his helmet back to Sierra status in a thirty percent mask over the forest around him and ordered, “Fox Three-three, execute.”
Not that Sergeant Jellicoe needed his okay. Her car, Floosie, had already steered to the right of the column’s track and was pulling up a rise. Flame Farter would be alone in the drag position until Floosie rejoined, and Floosie would be very much alone.
“A Rangemaster battery’s sent us a salvo of 200-mm shells,” Huber explained over the intercom. “The battery’s sited at one-thirty degrees from us, so Jellicoe’s breaking out of line for a moment to take care of the incoming. The Rangemasters’re a good enough outfit, but there’s next to no chance that anything’ll get past Floosie.”
He was speaking mostly for Orichos’ benefit; Fencing Master’s crew probably understood the situation as well as their lieutenant did. Well, Deseau and Tranter understood; Learoyd understood the little he needed to understand.
Mauricia Orichos nodded appreciatively, then quirked Huber a smile. “It’s like being a baby again,” she said. “I know there’s a lot going on, but I don’t understand any of it.”
Her smile grew marginally harder; she no longer looked haggard. She added, “We’ll be back in my element soon.”
Huber switched his helmet to remote, importing fire control imagery from Floosie. As an afterthought, he restored the link to Orichos’ helmet also.
The display was blank until Huber stuttered up three orders of magnitude. At such high gain there was a tiny quiver that even the Slammers’ electronics couldn’t fully damp.
The shell, twenty centimeters in diameter and almost two meters long, was a blurred dash in the four-bar reticle to which Jellicoe had set her sights. The image jumped minusculely as a tribarrel’s recoil jiggled the platform. Several cyan dots, vivid even at that range, intersected the shell.
The target ruptured in a red flash and a puff of dirty black smoke. Two more shells exploded into black rags in the sky around it; a fourth followed an instant later as one of the car’s tribarrels made a double. Bomblets from the last shell detonated around the initial burst in a white sparkle.
Huber thought he heard the distance-delayed thumping of Floosie’s guns, but he was probably wrong. Loud though they were up close, the sound of 2-cm discharges several klicks away would’ve been lost in Fencing Master’s intake roar. As for the shellbursts, they wouldn’t have been visible to unaided eyes even if the column had a clear view of the sky to the southeast.